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It was hard enough coming along that path, while the light lasted. If I were to go back over it in the dark, I'd break my neck on a million mangrove roots. If it's just the same to you, I'll take my chances with the pistol. It'll be an easier death, and in pleasanter company. So, if you really must shoot then blaze away!"
This is a promontory covered with cocoa-palms, bananas, and small jungle growths. On either side are small rivers densely bordered by mangrove swamps. The first sight of a real mangrove swamp is an event.
The breeze came stronger and stronger; and by the time the first streaks of early dawn appeared over the land, there was a strongish breeze blowing, hot, and smelling of the arid sand and damp mangrove marshes. "Faith, there is but little of the spices of Araby," I heard Terence O'Brien observe to one of his friends.
The night was clear and very dry. Dec. 10. We travelled about seven miles to the northward; but kept for the first three miles in a N.N.W. direction from our camp, when we came to a small plain, with a Mangrove creek going to the westward; scarcely two miles farther, we crossed a drooping tea-tree swamp, of which a Pandanus creek formed the outlet; and, two miles farther still, a large plain opened upon us, in which we saw a great number of natives occupied in burning the grass, and digging for roots.
What became of the monkey we cannot tell; but Jim Scroggles ran at headlong speed straight before him, crashing through brake and bush, in the full belief that the sheego was in hot pursuit, until he came to a mangrove swamp; here his speed was checked somewhat, for the trees grew in a curious fashion that merits special notice.
Floating with the current, with as little noise as possible, and having many a narrow escape of running against points of land and sandbanks, they flew swiftly towards the sea, so that dawn found them among the mud flats and the mangrove swamps.
I own the local scenery was a little too much of the Niger Delta type for perfect beauty, just the long lines of mangrove, and the muddy river lounging almost imperceptibly to sea, and nothing else in sight. Mr. Glass, however, did not take things so philosophically. I was on his commercial conscience, for I had come in from the bush and there was money in me.
Before them lay the apparently limitless expanse of the same formation, dotted sparsely with clumps of grass and flowers and at rare intervals with tiny mangrove islands. No signs of animal life were apparent. Even the birds were absent. There were only the buzzards overhead waiting, waiting, waiting. "See any water while you were hunting wood?" yawned Higgins.
Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped in the mud, so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to have laid down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for colonisation, for the time gradually comes when other mangroves can and do colonise on it, and flourish, extending their territory steadily; and the mud-bank joins up with, and becomes a part of, Africa.
This is an additional proof that malaria and offensive effluvia are not always companions. We did not suffer more from fever in the mangrove swamps, where we inhaled so much of the heavy mousey smell that it was distinguishable in the odour of our shirts and flannels, than we did elsewhere.
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